Prototype or Fail

These 5 different concepts continue from my last attempt to test a new design for a research project I’m working on – however these have been done on the ever-reliable Up! Plus 2 3D printers, not my useless Solidoodle Press! What a difference it makes…

Without going into specific details (the hush hush clause!) it was a great example of how important it is to test your ideas in the real world, you can’t rely on just what you see on screen and in your imagination. Each concept attempts to solve “the problem” in a slightly different way, and in fact the solutions we thought would work best didn’t, and the obscure ones that we didn’t really think would work very well have proven to be the best and are now evolving into the next stage of development. Without testing these we would never know, and could’ve invested a lot of time and money into something that wouldn’t have worked at all. So as the title says, prototype or fail.

Thanks to 3D printing it is very cheap and quick to test ideas, something that not so long ago may have taken a lot of time, skill and effort to make by hand, and thus limited the extent to which an idea could be explored. Having experienced these situations in professional practice where only a select couple of concepts could be squeezed into the budget (with plenty of kicking and screaming from clients), it’s amazing to now experience just how quick numerous ideas can be tested, with the above prototypes printed in an afternoon and analysed the next day in a 1 hour meeting. Done. We can move onto the next stage very quickly and with a lot of confidence in our direction.